FIG. 2 illustrates a listening room at Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, Germany. This listening room may be used for performing listening tests. These listening tests may be used for evaluating audio coding schemes. In order to ensure comparable and reproducible results of the listening tests, these tests may be performed in standardized listening rooms, such as the listening room illustrated in FIG. 2. This listening room follows the recommendation ITU-R BS 1116-1. In this room, the large number of 54 loudspeakers is mounted as a three-dimensional loudspeaker set-up. The loudspeakers are mounted on a two-layered circular truss suspended from the ceiling and on a rail system on the wall. The large number of loudspeakers provides great flexibility, which is useful, both for academic research and to study current and future sound formats.
With such a large number of loudspeakers, verifying that they are working correctly and that they are properly connected is a tedious and cumbersome task. Typically, each loudspeaker has individual settings at the loudspeaker box. Additionally, an audio matrix exists, which allows switching certain audio signals to certain loudspeakers. In addition, it cannot be guaranteed that all loudspeakers, apart from the speakers, which are fixedly attached to a certain support, are at their correct positions. In particular, the loudspeakers standing on the floor in FIG. 2 can be shifted back and forth and to the left and right and, therefore, it cannot be guaranteed that, at the beginning of a listening test, all speakers are at the position at which they should be, all speakers have their individual settings as they should have and that the audio matrix is set to a certain state in order to correctly distribute loudspeaker signals to the loudspeakers. Apart from the fact that such listening rooms are used by a plurality of research groups, electrical and mechanical failures can occur from time to time.
In particular, the following exemplary problems can occur. These are:                Loudspeakers not switched on or not connected        Signal routed to the wrong loudspeaker, signal cable connected to the wrong loudspeaker        Level of one loudspeaker wrongly adjusted in the audio routing system or at the loudspeaker        Wrongly set equalizer in the audio routing system or at the loudspeaker        Damage of a single driver in a multi-way loudspeaker        Loudspeaker is wrongly placed, oriented or an object is obstructing the acoustic pathway.        
Normally, in order to manually evaluate the functionality of the loudspeaker set-up in the listening area, a great amount of time is involved. This time may be used for manually verifying the position and orientation of each loudspeaker. Additionally, each loudspeaker has to be manually inspected in order to find out the correct loudspeaker settings. In order to verify the electrical functionality of the signal routing on the one hand and the individual speakers on the other hand, a highly experienced person may perform a listening test where, typically, each loudspeaker is excited with the test signal and the experienced listener then evaluates, based on his knowledge, whether this loudspeaker is correct or not.
It is clear that this procedure is expensive due to the fact that a person performing it may be highly experienced. Additionally, this procedure is tedious due to the fact that the inspection of all loudspeakers will typically reveal that most, or even all, loudspeakers are correctly oriented and correctly set, but on the other hand, one cannot dispense with this procedure, since a single or several faults, which are not discovered, can destroy the significance of a listening test. Finally, even though an experienced person conducts the functionality analysis of the listening room, errors are, nevertheless, not excluded.